Every stockman in the northwest recalls the hard winter of '86-'87. It broke most of them. One cattleman, spending his winter in the South, wrote back to his ranch to inquire how his stuff was wintering.
His line rider took a pencil and drew the picture of a starving cow hung up in the drifts. Under it he wrote: Waiting for a chinook. The last of the five thousand.
The man who drew that picture was Charlie Russell, the daddy of them all when it came to putting the cow and the horse and the Indian and the cowpuncher on canvas or in clay. But in '86 Charlie was a cowpuncher.
This is not a story about Charlie Russell. He is mentioned no more in the tale. I speak of him here because when a cowman of Montana recalls the winter of '86 he invariably mentions that picture of Charlie Russell's as an illustration for his tale of hardship. It tells better than any words the bitter curse of that hard winter.
Walter John Coburn was born October 23, 1889 and died May 1971. He was an American writer of Westerns. Coburn was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana Territory, the son of Robert Coburn Senior, the founder of the noted Circle C Ranch located south of Malta.
In Public Domain
First Published 1928
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The man who hated himself
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